Stabilized ruin. This is after 142 years of use as a prison, which, when it first opened in 1829, was considered experimental. It was a brandnew type a prison. It was so unlike anything else tried at that time. They did not want to call it a prison. They invented a new word penitentiary. The root in that word is the root is penitent. The root in that word is penitent. This is the first attempt at the humane treatment of a criminal. A very quaker inspired idea that deep down everybody was perfectly good. In this building, that person would have a chance to reflect on their life and become penitent, to change themselves and reform themselves through that feeling. A great question is, how do you make someone penitent . How do you make someone confront some of those decisions they had made . Well spend a lot of time inside the cell blocks addressing that. While were out here, take a quick look around, i want to show you some of the architecture of this place. When it first opened in 1829 the architect of the building, a young british man won a 100 prize to design the thing. He wanted to look hundreds of years older than it actually was. He goes with this gothic revival style. You can see the battlements. The arrow slit windows. Even the imposingness of the stone facade, you have to imagine it the way of the way a philadelphia and would have and the early 1800s. First off, you would hopefully be seeing it from two miles away. The city today is totally surrounding the entire prison, but when it first opened, this was acres of open farmland all around. Imagine that you are in that smaller city. You look up to the north. You would be looking at this, the largest public structure on the continent. It was supposed to intimidate. All of the castlelike elements are supposed to make us think about one of the things we associate with a castle absolute authority, dungeons and torture. You imagine what happens in the basement of the castle. Interesting that inside of what was happening here was actually this new attempt at humane punishment. When the outside was such a harsh and intimidating kind of look towards the outside. It is also, as far as castles go, totally safe. Those battlements on top of the 80 foot south tower are kneehigh. They are not going to help in any kind of siege. All along the outside of the perimeter, you will see arrow slit windows, but they do not go through the wall. There is no aperture on the inside. Again, just for the look of the thing, rather than the actual function of it. But i want to bring us around the way, show you more of the architecture outside before we head to one of the oldest cellblocks on site. Im going to head just up this way. Watch your step. It is very icy out. I am going to bring us into the corner here, just to give you a sense of the scale of this place. 10. 5 acres. The perimeter wall, you can get a sense of. 30 feet high. It goes another 10 feet deep. Underground. This is almost 8 feet thick. At its race. This goes for halfmile all away all the way around the site. So, not just the largest, but i want to stress this this was the most expensive thing, one of the United States had ever built. The only more expensive building on the continent was the capitol dome in d. C. , as far as public structures go. This tells us a lot about the priorities of these early pennsylvanians. This was the major project. It was 8 times over its budget. And they kept building. They were committed towards this new approach, this new idea, just to try something new as far as crime and punishment, compared to what they had been doing. But we are going to head inside to cellblock one. Come on in. This is cellblock one from 1829. It is, by todays standards, kind of gloomy. But back then, this was considered beautifully well lit for 19th century standards. Every cell even had its own skylight in here. So, we said the outside architecture resembled kind of this gothic revival castle. You see the inside. It is much more cathedrallike. A lot of these early ideas of penitence was very religiously inspired. This is when crime was often equated with sin. A lot of these ideas of penitence are built into the building. We will see examples of this as we go through. Before we focus on what eastern state was doing, take a look at prisons beforehand. This is what they were trying to not do here. This is an illustration of newgate prison in london. William penn spent time here when he was a young, reckless quaker. But this was similar to other jails here. You get the sense of everything going on here. Total chaos. Fighting. What we think of as Correctional Officers today did not exist back then. It does not matter if someone was, picked someones pockets or stabbed them to death, everyone was in the same room together. Mercifully, the artist did not draw the opens were that was in this area. Disease was prevalent. Typhus was so common they called it jail fever. You did not have to worry if you had money. Usually prisons would have a , separate area for the aristocracy. But if someone did not have money or did not have family to support them for their time in prison, they might not eat. Many of these prisons, food was not provided. You had to purchase it. This was way different than what we think about prison today. Today, prison is the punishment. Back then, jails and prisons were just the waiting area. This is where someone would be held pretrial. In the meantime, if they want to dance on the table or play ball or gamble i love this as an example. One jail had a bar in it. If you did not have enough money, you could sell your clothes for liquor. You can imagine the kind of environment people were being held in. Of course, the trial would occur in the punishment, again, not time. It would be maybe a fine execution for serious crimes banishment, occasionally, but much more commonly, physical punishment. There are some examples we have illustrated along the wall. Whipping very common. Estate loved with thing. It was cheap, easy to do. The worse the crime was, the more times the criminal would be beaten. Then they are free to go. Branding. This is another painful one. But you can see, i mean, the pain of being burned with a hot iron was not the real punishment. The real punishment was branding, the mark that lasted forever. Sometimes on the face, indicating criminal. Compare that to the ideas here about trying to change someone. Very different approaches. Stockades, pillories. This was more about public humiliation. If you are familiar with philadelphia, there is a beautiful park about three minutes from here called logans square. 300 years ago you could bring , your whole family to have an entertaining evening of throwing rocks at criminals. If you are really lucky, you could catch a public hanging. Although pennsylvania was the first state to say maybe we do not want to do that outside. So this was it. This was our criminal Justice System. It had some quirks that reformers were looking at. The prisons, of kursk, were filthy, violent, and the prisons, of course, were filthy, violent, and overcrowded. The punishments were not seen as cruel and unusual. This is a bigger issue pretty this is a bigger issue, you can imagine. Lets say there is a young firsttime offender. They get arrested, they spent a few weeks in walnut street jail. They are getting drunk, catching typhus, hanging out with criminals, they get whipped. You can imagine what that persons life is like afterwards. There is no incentive to reform. Not only are they going to go back to their old ways, but they considered those prisons an area where you can learn new crimes. Tricks of the trade, networking, right . These guys want to switch it up. If you visit philadelphia, you will get very acquainted with ben franklin. He was so active in civic life. He invites some wealthy and prominent philadelphians over to his place. Bishop William White among them. I love the name of the group they come up with. The Philadelphia Society for alleviating the miseries of public prisons. It is a little long. Today the group is still around. It is the pennsylvania prison society. We are looking at the First Organization in the world dedicated to prison reform. This is shortly before franklin was involved with helping to write what became the bill of rights that language about cruel and unusual punishment, we see that today in the 8th amendment. No cruel or unusual punishment. They had a new idea for how a person could run, but they would need a very expensive, custombuilt prison to try it out. The idea that they had it took them 30 years to convince the state on. It is called the separate system. And all of the architecture and technology in this building was designed around the idea. So, instead of dozens of people tossed together, at eastern state penitentiary, one prisoner would spend the entire sentence, an average of 2 to 8 years back then, in this cells. They would never leave it. They would never see another prisoner. And they had to serve the time in absolute silence. Again, the goal was penitence. How do you make someone penitent . It was, again, this quakerinspired belief that the innate goodness of a person. If you just seal away the evils of the outside world, they would naturally return to that goodness. After a few hours, and a few days, they would ask for something to do. A book was provided. You can probably guess which one. The bible. And no other books. In the early days, no reading material outside of that. No newspapers. Not even letters. Certainly no personal visits from friends or family. But it was not pure isolation. They had a few professional visits. The moral instructor. It sounds quite today, but you think in prisons today, the idea of caseworkers and psychiatrists. That got started here. Same thing with jobtraining. It is something we see in practically every prison today. Once a month at eastern state, a professional would calm, give the prisoner the materials they needed to learn the craft or a trade. Cellblock one is the shoemaking cellblock. There was another one for weaving, furniture making, cigar rolling. It is a simple idea, but just, again, the hope is in here, they are going to have this quiet reflective time. Learn how to become a new person and then they are going to leave with a set of job skills and get a job and become a taxpayer. Amazingly high ideals at that point. Yeah, and when it first opened there was a lot of hope for the wave was going to go this way. You can maybe already get a sense of what happened. When it first opened though, the entire world sat up and took notice of philadelphia. Foreign dignitaries as far away as china were being sent to the city for the first time with the express purpose of studying this building. Part of it was this new idea of penitence but much of it was actually in the architecture and technology. This was really, there are some architectural historians that consider eastern state penitentiary the first modern building in the world on account of its largescale environmental systems. Every cell had running water. Every cell had a room and a rudimentary a flush toilet. You can see in this diagram it , connects to a central sewer. This building had central heating in 1829. Even the warden was required to live in that front gate house. He did not have a toilet. They did not think of it as a luxury. It was the answer to how to keep someone isolated . They wanted no distractions in that little crucible of penitence, so that they could focus on their own personal path of betterment. Every cell even had its own private, attached backyard. 23 hours a day locked inside. Then an officer would unlock an intermediate set of gates. They were allowed for, to one half hours near sunrise and evening, for fresh air and sunlight. Almost like a little dog run off the back of each cell. If a prisoner wanted to garden it was encouraged. The position thought it was therapeutic. Some prisoners even kept birds and rabbits. I read about one prisoner who was growing teaches peaches to supplement his meals. Three meals a day delivered to the cell. Its funny. If all you heard about was the peaches and cocoa and gardens, you would be like, this place is amazing. If all you heard about was the silence and enforced isolation, you would think that this was the most terrible prison ever built. But the fact it was both. It means this was an entirely new type of punishment. It is a reason its of the founder so long to convince the state. They had to say, listen, do not expect anyone to change lastingly unless you take care of all of the material needs first. Only then, will the prisoner be able to focus on the spiritual discipline that they were trying to get people to address in here. Brandnew ideas for this time. This is another curiosity. You can see this prisoner here is hooded. He has gone officer behind him they were called keepers at that time, being led into the cell. Whenever prisoners were moved around, first got in they were , hooded. So they cannot see anyone else. It ups that feeling of isolation. They cannot see the building. It is disorienting. If you are trying to escape, you come out of the cell, what is the first thing you see . It is totally quiet. Now what . But here is a curiosity. We have hoods with eye holes. What is the purpose of a hood if they can see the building or other prisoners . This is a new idea here. The hoods were to preserve the anonymity of the prisoner. They were only identified by an inmate number. The hope was only a handful of people would actually knew that they would have served time. After the time at eastern state, the hope was they would go and have a fresh start. Compare that to being branded on the face and known as a horse thief the rest of your life. Or even today, a felony conviction will show up on student loan applications or housing applications. These were brandnew ideas for that time. But im going to show you the inside of one of these cells of the early separate system here. Much of the building we are keeping in the state of stabilized decay. This area you can see, we actually restored a cell to what it wouldve looked like in that early separate system. Wood floors, all the working materials, and of course that , gate would have led to that backyard. There are these curious half doors on the outside here. The first three cellblocks they built, they did not bother putting doors to the inside. Prisoners were brought in through the act of that yard. This was a feeding window. Food and working materials where pastor the iran door. Trying to cut down on human food and working materials where put through the iron door. Trying to cut down on human contact. Imagine if your meal slides in silently. If you did not clean it, by the time it was retracted, you would not get your next meal. So, on paper, everything sounds great. But in practice, the separate system had so many issues with it. Imagine today in a prison, who mops the floors . Who does the maintenance . The prisoners. But who was supposed to do that if everyone is locked in learning Cottage Industries . They just broke the rules. Prisoners were brought out to work in the kitchen, in the laundry. The first warden samuel wood wanted a butler. So he took a prisoner out of isolation. William hamilton becomes his personal servant. He was the first person to escape. If everything happened according to plan, it would be an incredibly strict prison. But in actuality, it was impossible to maintain. Lets take a look inside one of the cells just up the way here. So, these two cells are open. Take a step inside. Watch your head here. So, you can hear out echoy it is in here. Part of that again, early on was the silence. Any noise was any noise would be punished. So the entire place was whisper quiet. The officers were told to put socks on over there boots. Their boots. If you were in your backyard your neighbors were not. They did not want inmates shouting over the walls. I should mention, what we see in the cell today, this became in the 1930s, one of the maximumsecurity units. So the bed frame is bolted to the ground. The toilets this is a modern toilet encased in concrete. So no one could smash it and have a shard as a weapon. And the axis to the backyards and the access to the backyards, they eventually started using the backyard spaces for other things. And the entryways to them were sealed up. So were looking at a lot of layers to the present through the prison through decades of history, even though we are talking about the early days. Lets head on back out this way. Pretty spacious in there. Compared to other prisons at that time, especially. And also designed for one. Add in the backyard, that was a lot of space. It was a lot of expense, but this prison, the separate system , had so many different problems built in. One was i mean, you can imagine what happens if you keep someone alone in silence for years at a time. Not exactly mentally healthy. And that silence rule was being broken so frequently. They were trying to be humane, but the punishments were, well they escalated quickly. It starts they would take a meal away. Then they would take yard time away. But the prisoner just could not stop talking or trying to communicate with other people. They were learning, shouting down the toilet. Throwing notes into adjacent yards. They had something called the iron gag. Think of it like a horses bit. A chunk of metal to the press of the tongue. It locks around the back of the head with chains. In 1833, there was one death in the prison. A prisoner serving 12 years for murder choked to death in the iron gag. A prompted an investigation. That inspection came in here. They were addressing a number of different whistleblower complaints about the warden. It turns out the place was going not according to plan. That inspection learned prisoners were regularly allowed out of the separate system. They found out the wife of one of the officers was throwing parties in the front gate house and inviting the prisoners. It was chaos. And then they also found out this, kind of issue with the , Mental Health of solitary confinement. Starting to not, admit that it was a problem, but certainly adjusting it. That problems that Problem Solved itself. They did not have to worry about the effects of isolation when they had to worry about overcrowding. As early as 12 years in, they ran out of cells. The entire prison was built for solitary separate confinement, and now they had to have two to a cell. Then they had two or three or five to a cell. This is two cells joined together. At the highest peak of population, there were seven prisoners in one cell. So, all of these reasons for building the prison, this penitentiary, to separate someone from the challenges of being with another person, they did not have to worry about disease or violence or contraband or criminal ideas being passed around. Suddenly, they are right back to where they started. So, this was, for decades in the late 1800s the prison system, this separate system was unraveling. Until 1913, they officially admit the separate system was broken. Again, looks great on paper. In practice, it was unworkable. Expensive to build, expensive to run mentally unhealthy, and then , so overcrowded they could not keep everyone separate anyway. The prison changes. I want you to imagine this pl